ALL during these active years Page never abandoned
the cause that had formed the main purpose of his
life from earliest days -- the improvement of American
citizenship through popular education. The great builder
of the American democracy was not the statesman, the industrial leader, the pulpit exhorter; not even the scientist
or the poet or the editor; the one figure on whom the national destiny depended was the school teacher. Never did Page let pass an opportunity to magnify the opportunities
of this somewhat obscure and humble worker. As an
editor -- of the Forum, the Atlantic, and the World's Work
-- the subject of education always had the right of way. Page was constantly corresponding with educational leaders, searching out the new ideas, the places where these
ideas had been most profitably developed, and more than
once he organized elaborate and expensive "investigations" and thus presented the existing status of this great
national enterprise to the American public. How importantly the school teacher loomed in his eyes appeared
in a letter written, in 1896, to William R. Harper, the brilliant young President of the new University of Chicago.

To William Rainey Harper

October 24, 1896.

DEAR MR. HARPER,

The most interesting group of people, I have thought,
I ever saw together -- interesting for their social signi-

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